10 Most Funded Crowdfunded Projects

New tech is developed and released every day. Our global technological development has been rising at an exponential rate for decades, with each new breakthrough bringing us forward by massive strides. Many of those new developments come from the private sector, from individuals and small teams developing new ideas that change our world in countless ways. The public sector encourages this, with many companies even sponsoringcontests to encourage new innovations.

Technology isn’t the only field that develops in unusual and surprising ways all the time. A fairly recent innovation that has changed the playing field for acquiring funding for new ideas. Crowdfunding started small, but exploded quickly into something that now generates billions of dollars per year for savvy inventors and entrepreneurs.

Getting your new idea to the market can present a significant challenge, unless you have significantpersonal capital to bootstrap your idea. With the advent of crowdfunding, anyone with a strong idea and a stronger pitch can generate potentially huge amounts of startup capital. Sometimes into the seven-figures. It would be impossible to get asmall business loan anywhere near that amount, allowing crowdfunded projects to often launch right from the start into revenue levels that many small businesses never dream of seeing.

Once funding succeeds, however, the challenges do not stop there. Depending on the product and the industry, manufacturing issues, quality problems, even the logistics of distribution can arise and bring a million-dollar crowdfunded project to its knees even before all of the rewards have been paid out to backers. While many highly funded projects result in hugely successful businesses that thrive and grow long after initial funding, the below list shows clearly that doesn’t always hold true.

Take a look below and find out who won their way onto the top ten most crowdfunded projects of all time, and what happened to the companies and products after the completion of the project.